Conventional search engines commonly use keywords from a user-input search query to locate and display webpages. For example, if a user were interested in learning about which countries border the United States, the user may enter a search query of “country bordering United States.” In response, a conventional search engine may return webpages with all or some of the four words “country,” “bordering,” “United,” and “States.”
However, such a query would likely return a large number (e.g., tens of millions) of irrelevant or undesired webpages. For example, the results may contain webpages about country music in the United States, general information about the Unites States, etc. As such, users generally perform overly restrictive searches to narrow the number of results to a more manageable amount, thereby excluding many relevant webpages from the results. Thus, finding relevant information on the Internet using conventional keyword-based search engines can be tedious and time-consuming.
The number of relevant results returned by conventional search engines is further limited by the literal nature of the conventional keyword search methodology. For example, webpages may use synonyms or other words related to the keywords entered in the search query, but not use one or more of the exact keywords. In this case, conventional keyword-based search engines may not include these webpages in the search results, especially where a more restrictive search is used (e.g., using an “and” operator, or other type of operator, between keywords of the search query). Accordingly, searching for relevant information using conventional search engines is made even more cumbersome given the literal nature of conventional keyword searches.
Further, some conventional search engines rank search results based on the relevance of the webpages to keywords of the user-input search query. Although this may reorganize the search results, it does not solve the above-mentioned problems of returning irrelevant search results and other problems caused by the literal nature of conventional keyword-based search engines.